A Beginning Step to Co-Creation

You are what you charge for. And if you're competing solely on the basis of price, then you've been commoditized, offering little or no true differentiation. What would your customers really value? Better yet, for what would they pay a premium? Experiences.

Joseph Pine co-author of the book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage, explains this process in this video. Another video, The Experience Economy Birthday Party provides another excellent example in story form.

I have written two other blog posts, Does your Value Proposition speak of the Customer Experience? and Changing the shape of your marketing funnel! that expands on some of these thoughts.

The Experience Economy description is an excellent introduction to co-creation. It takes us away from the basic thoughts of products and services and moves us into the world of differentiation and uniqueness based on what the customer truly values. And it is not our product and service anymore that the customer values.  It is the USE of our product and service and the resulting benefit of it. Till we start thinking that way, the step to co-creation is probably unobtainable.

Related Information:
A great resource on Co-Creation is Graham Hill.
Marketing with PDCA
Business Processes as Value Networks
Quality and Collaboration eBook
Dr. Jeff Liker on PDCA and Lean Culture

Will the Mvp crush the Lean Startup?

This seems an appropriate post this week since there was big hullabaloo about a certain App that claimed certain features and did not deliver. If they intended it to be a minimum viable product (Mvp), let’s just say there was more MINIMUM than viable in the product. Though it was discovered and bantered about the Lean community it raised a bigger issue for me. With all the talk of iterative use, fail often and early and MVP being battered about especially in the Lean Startup (term trademarked by Eric Ries) are we forgetting one of the foundational pillars of Lean. That pillar is Respect for People.

The reason I mention the Lean Startup is that I find few in that community firmly rooted in Lean Principles. They look at Lean as meaning a waste reduction process. That reduction meaning their time to market and their time spent on developing product. In fact, at a Lean Startup event in Grand Rapids, Michigan recently, l saw presenters advocating the use of fake web fronts and click buttons into blank spaces all to “test” customer’s responses.

When I think of the term Lean, three things come to my mind: Customer Value, PDCA(Kaizen) and Respect for People. I believe that these are key components of Lean and TPS. Without these the TPS house crumbles. Lean is about delivering Value in the eyes of the customer. Lean is about PDCA not just Do and Adapt. Lean is about Respect not Use.

I believe Eric Ries has made an outstanding contribution to Lean in general and to the field of innovation and startups. In fact, I am a big advocate of his methods. However, the big M (minimum) may cause his house to be short lived as demonstrated by one stray APP developer as he pleaded Kaizen, Iteration and Beta after accepting money and obviously delivering less than a viable product. I feel strongly about the Lean culture that has developed over the years and continues to grow and even take its own life forms such as Agile and the Lean Startup. But as most of us know, it is important to understand and respect our roots. It only makes a stronger in the long run.

To my knowledge this APP Developer has no affiliation with the Lean Startup. My reason for the connection is to demonstrate the bad side as visibly as possible.

Related Information:
Warning: You Can’t Even Draw a Map with this “Value Stream Mapper” App
The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota
The New Names of Marketing are still PDCA
Dealing with uncertainty in the Lean Startup
Lean Thinking: Prototype early and often

Operational Excellence in Government, is it Possible?

When I first listened to Mike George’s Stong America Now program, I thought it was a joke that hardly made any sense. However, I have learned to investigate things that rub me the wrong way initially and many times I have found a little gold in the outcomes.

One of those outcomes was the opportunity to interview Hundley Elliotte one of the authors of Building High Performance Government Through Lean Six Sigma: A Leader's Guide to Creating Speed, Agility, and Efficiency. What I liked about the book was it really removes the issues about can it be done, it is already being done. In the podcast, we discussed these places and also discussed the how in applying Lean Six Sigma to any public organization.

The authors paint a very clear picture of the role of Lean Six Sigma in Government. It is a very well written book without the statistical jargon so often found in Lean Six Sigma books. I even found certain parts of the book remarkably useful for the private sector.

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Hundley M. Elliotte is the global lead for the Process Performance group within the Accenture Process & Innovation Performance service line. He has more than 15 years of consulting experience, focusing on managing business value, setting strategy, identifying customer needs, and identifying and implementing improvement opportunities in diverse business sectors. Previously, Mr. Elliotte worked for more than a decade in the corporate sector, holding sales, marketing and general management positions with a leading pulp and paper manufacturer and with a plastics company. He is based in Atlanta.

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 223,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries.

Read Chapter One, “Building the Anatomy for High Performance”

Read about the Accenture Institute for Health and Public Service.

Related Information:
DMAIC, DMADV, Lean, Six Sigma for Government?
Lean Six Sigma for Government
Lean Six Sigma will increase effectiveness of Stimulus spending
The Hell with the Economic Stimulus Package – I’ll Lead
Balancing Internal and External Lean Six Sigma Consulting Roles